Politics Books

The feminist author chooses liberating literature for women, from Virginia Woolf to Erica Jong. She says that men still don’t share equal responsibility in the home, and that life after divorce can be easier.

Warnings about the future of society contained in novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four may seem less important since the fall of the Soviet Union, but they are all too relevant to China today, argues the Chinese writer

The 'Great Fire Wall of China'. How has the Chinese Communist Party managed to survive the internet? Economist correspondent Gady Epstein chooses books on the world's most successful case of authoritarian control of the internet.

The Mail on Sunday’s Royal Correspondent, Katie Nicholl, looks at how the histories of the previous generation have shaped Princes William and Harry. She picks the best books on the British royals.

The China specialist and UCLA professor Richard Baum (1940-2012) says that he sometimes feels genuine admiration for China’s technocratic leaders. Other days, he shakes his head at their obsessive intransigence and China's endemic political insecurity.

From a biography of the Soviet Union's most successful spy to an isolated German general in Tanzania in World War I, from a brilliant novel of World War II to what it was like in Moscow during Stalin's show trials, British journalist Richard Beeston (1962-2013) recommends a range of books that resonated with him as he reported from troublespots around the globe.  

The idea that girls are emotional and “boys don’t cry” is ridiculous, says the feminist and psychologist. She tells us about books that debunk the gender myths that continue to restrict and distort our lives.

American presidents may not want to send troops into battle or militarise foreign policy but, in the end, most of them do. The author and journalist explains how this happens, and why it’s not even the military that's to blame. He picks the best books on American militarism.

The Princeton philosophy professor tells us about the meaning of honour, how it's won and lost, and what role it has played in the history of moral change

Why do huge stories sometimes go unreported? Our news media are good at promulgating conventional wisdom but find it much more difficult to deal with evidence that contradicts it, says the former Washington Post reporter